But it’s not the level most shipping companies are operating at!

Most do better… much better

This month I had the pleasure to be interviewed by the editor of Marine Engineering Review, Namrata Nadkarni, to chat about the role of Class in regards to condition monitoring and condition based maintenance.

In reading through the resulting copy which is attached above and I realised that the point that came across most clearly was that most shipping companies do far more than they are required by law to do and they do it for some other motivating reason.

I would say that, in the main, those who fall foul of the survey process do so not because they are actively cutting corners but because they have “dropped the ball” briefly and have been focused elsewhere.

This lead me to surmise two additional points; 1 – that even then most minimum investment in routine CM can be useful by means of demonstrating ongoing reliability and 2 – That where companies seek to do better than the minimum they do so at their cost and do so because of some other value judgement. What I mean is that we value other things and measure success in other ways than simply price. We know this anyway otherwise we would all be driving the cheapest cars or wearing the cheapest clothes, the same is true for businesses. Yes we must make money and doing so routinely is the goal of all companies but we also have to create value in often intangible ways. Reputation, quality, reliability, safety, alignment with certain values, environmental position etc.

We held a CM Forum at Lloyd’s Register recently where the subject of justification for CM was discussed. Our conclusion was that simple “Cash spent – Benefit returned” models are meaningless as they make an assumption that failure prevention and reliability enhancement are purely proportional to the amount of cash invested in the maintenance process – related yes, reliant – to some extend, but dependent – I think not!

We concluded that risk avoidance and risk reduction was a more useful form of currency to use to define the benefit of moving towards a more intelligence lead strategic maintenance management process.

So in short look to the wider non fiscal benefits, to the community, to the process of operation and the process of maintenance and to delivery of marine transportation services that we can be proud of.